_Metre_poetry magazine ran for seventeen issues from 1996 to 2005 and was edited by Irish poets Justin Quinn and David Wheatley, with the support of an editorial board. The intervening period has rendered some of those involved or associated with the magazine with hazy memories, while others prefer not to recall. The silences are important to note, the absences marked. Still, one can patch together a history of sorts of this ‘Magazine of International Poetry’, albeit one that remains uncertain. Gaps remain, and variances are present which both confirm and gently unthread any singular understanding of what _Metre_really was.
The duo of editors started out as a triumvirate, with Hugh Maxton / W.J. MacCormack, then a Professor in Trinity, given billing as a ‘Founding Editor’, and an editor of the first two issues. While ‘Bill’ was encouraging of the start, ‘once the magazine got up and running he drew away, to the extent that it no longer made sense to have him on the masthead. He had so many interesting other projects on the go–poetic, academic–that it was probably difficult for him timewise,’ according to Justin.
There were others who stepped in to help meet the demands of publishing a poetry magazine, particularly necessary given Justin was living in Prague, and made even more so by David’s move to Hull at the end of 1999. Despite this, the very existence of the editorial board is curiously contested by many of those who sat on it. Aisling Maguire, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Selina Guinness are all named from the start, Philip Coleman and Kit Fryatt have been described as belonging to the ‘middle period’, while John McAuliffe and Maria Johnston came on board towards the latter stages of the magazine. Their contributions varied, the true extent of some remaining unknown. Or, well, unspoken here. What can be said, is that the board never met in full in any formal way. This was, it seems, a fairly ad hoc arrangement, with people contributing how and when they could.
Ray Lynn of Betaprint was integral too, his praises echoed by all who name him, including Quinn: ‘Ray was fantastic. I came with designs at the start and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s interesting…’, and I knew I had to go away and pull them apart.’
The first issue, published in Autumn 1996, followed a request for financial support from literary figures in Ireland, and its contents was largely solicited. With a cheque for £250, Seamus Heaney enclosed a piece on Joseph Brodsky, reprinted from the New York Times Book Review(Heaney was later to follow up with a cheque for £1,000 on the publication of the first issue). Derek Mahon had nothing original to provide, but offered a translation of Francis Ponge, which was gratefully received by a magazine whose admiration for Mahon’s work is well known. Pieces by Bernard O’Donoghue and Harry Clifton sit alongside translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and Leszek Engelking, while the younger generation of Irish poets is represented by Conor O’Callaghan, Vona Groarke, and diverse voices appear in the form of Denise Riley and Gwyneth Lewis. It was a strong debut for a new magazine.
The modest Dublin-based operation underpinning this relatively small magazine, buttressed by the support–financial and otherwise–of influential figures, provided the means to quickly develop a reputation in Irish poetry at this time. The reputation is not undeserved, but it remains relatively contested, or perhaps uncertain is a more accurate word here, dependent largely on how one sees the relationship between _Metre_and its contemporaries within the Irish poetry scene at that time.
From the perspective of the founding editors, the goal of _Metre_was to extend the attentions of Irish poets and readers, to direct readers to less well- known poets working in other anglophone regions, and to poets outside of the anglophone canon.
The internationalism, the interest in form, the personal and professional relationships between editors and contributors, the external perception of a cerebralism, and the success of these individuals in their own poetic careers, has led to the critical formulation of a loose grouping referred to as the ‘_Metre_Generation’. Some use this term with relative ease, with both Aisling and Maria aligning elements of the group with influences from New Formalism, but David is not comfortable with such an alignment; ‘We ran a scoffing review by Harry Clifton of a New Formalist anthology, and that combination of by-the-book formalism with a whiff of social conservatism–that wasn’t my understanding of what we were up to, at all.’ If the poetic production varied enough between
the relevant poets to problematise the ‘_Metre_Generation’ grouping, one thing they did all seem to share was a commitment to forthright criticism that was intelligent and, where possible, witty, and this can be seen in the reviews and essays through all the issues.
‘Ruffling feathers’ is a subject all contributors were asked to speak to for this piece. The term was used in an essay by Fran Brearton when considering the influence the British magazine _Thumbscrew_had had on Metre. _Thumbscrew_was founded by Tim Kendall, who appears in the first issue of Metre, who, in another context, names David and Justin alongside a host of writers for Thumbscrew‘who shared not so much a program or manifesto as a distaste for the insider dealings of the poetry scene’ and who could be relied on ‘to state what they thought and to state it intelligently.’ Thumbscrew, as ‘an independent little magazine… need[ed] not pander to anyone,’ and it clearly provided an influence, if not a model, for the approach of _Metre_to reviewing.
It is inarguable that the magazine published considerably more work by male poets than female poets, and the internationalism of the poetry does not expand the pages themselves to be ‘representative’ in terms of the ethnic diversity of contributors. Contacting these contributors for this piece may have prompted some further reflection on these matters, which are expressed in this piece by the editors in considered terms.
After seventeen issues, Metreceased to publish the magazine in 2005 (though there was the June 2016 publication of Cathal McCabe’s Outer Space: Selected Poems, which followed the publication of four pamphlets in 2003 and 2004; Harry Clifton’s God in France, Jane Yeh’s Teen Spies, Evan Rail’s Tsunami, and Vona Groarke’s Windmill Hymns). The archive of the magazine is available online (http://metre.ff.cuni.cz/), hosted by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague, under the auspices of the Centre for Irish Studies.As with everything, Metre‘s legacy is neither agreed nor permanent. For some, it represents a positive force to emerge from a particularly poor time in Irish poetry; for others it was a vehicle to reach a new audience. There are others who look to the practical impact of the criticism, celebrating the archive online, while to others it is an important personal marker that has significance beyond the pages printed in the magazine itself.
Ireland, 2022
Beginnings
David WheatleyI’m a little hazy as to exact dates, but _Metre_was born in the mid-90s from a series of conversations between Justin Quinn, Hugh Maxton/W.
J. MacCormack and me. I was floundering in the quag of what seemed an unfinishable PhD, Justin was already in Prague, and Hugh Maxton was in Goldsmith’s. There was a sense of: why not–why not upgrade all those intense pub conversations about poetry into something more durable, and it took off from there. Jarlath Hayes, who I would go and visit in his house in Stillorgan, designed us a lovely masthead. The editorial board of Aisling Maguire, Caitríona O’Reilly, Selina Guinness, Kit Fryatt, and Philip Coleman were largely in Dublin too, with John McAuliffe and Maria Johnston coming on board later on. Ray Lynn of Betaprint was also a great help.
Justin QuinnAs I recall, the conversation took place in O’Neill’s pub just off Dame Street. We kind of talked ourselves into a corner and had no option but to do it then. So we just kind of said ‘we need money, first of all’. We knew we couldn’t go to the Arts Council because we had nothing to show for ourselves. We knew that we had a chance to get a grant from them if we had one issue out, so basically we sent out begging letters to the great and the good in Ireland saying ‘give us some money’. That was kind of important that we were getting some expression of faith from people beyond ourselves, that it wasn’t just us crazy people. And so they actually sent us money, and when people send you money you actually then have an obligation to do it, so we said okay, we’d better get a printer, we’d better get stuff to put in it, and it just went like that basically. It was very freaky for me and David.
‘Editorial Board’
Aisling MaguireI did a lot of the manual stuff, distributing the magazine, and the administrative stuff, the money, the banking, the administration, that side of things. I suppose it was a job, I just did it. It wasn’t very onerous. It was mostly posting out copies when they came from the printer. I’ll tell you what was difficult; getting bookshops to take Metre. Books Upstairs of course was wonderful, they were delighted to take it, and they were very positive. There were some other places that took it and didn’t pay us. And Hanna’s used to take it, but when that changed over to Eason they weren’t so interested. So actually that was the biggest problem. Posting them out was just putting them in envelopes and bringing them to the post office, it wasn’t a big deal, but getting it into bookshops was a big deal, in a country that prides itself on its literary heritage. I think Justin approached one bookshop outside of Dublin, which would be very well known but shall remain nameless, and they never paid.
Philip ColemanAisling and I worked very closely together on the practical stuff after David and Caitríona went to Hull: we used to meet up to package copies of the magazine for distribution, for example, and I recall the two of us hauling boxes of magazines to the post office on St Andrew’s Street in Dublin to get copies out to subscribers! I don’t recall any formal meetings of the editorial board–these were the days before Zoom and Microsoft Teams!–but I always felt that Justin and David were the editors-in-chief, as it were.
Kit FryattDavid asked myself and Philip… just to mind the post really. Just to sift through and get rid of the stuff they really wouldn’t be interested in publishing, the inevitable kind of stuff that arrives that just isn’t really of interest to a magazine, and forward on the rest for consideration to him in Hull. But really we were just post boys.
Goals
JQDavid and I would have shared a feeling that Irish poetry criticism in that period was a bit too insular, in two ways. Firstly, we felt, obviously we were in our early twenties, champing at the bit, it was just the same books being reviewed by the same people and we wanted to open that up for a start, to get people who wouldn’t normally review poetry collections, like to get a novelist, or to get people from outside Ireland to review Irish books. But also similarly to cover what was going on in British poetry and in US poetry. I would have felt very strongly at the time that Irish poetry per se wasn’t really doing much for me, and I had my eye mainly on the US, and it was often very difficult to actually physically get the books. I remember I had to phone Knopf in New York to get a copy of James Merrill’s memoir… so I thought, one of my ambitions for it was that it would do something about that, it would just kind of say ‘there’s all this stuff going on over there, it’s interesting’, and that it’s possible to look beyond Ireland and find interesting stuff.
AMAs you know, the poetry scene here is very small, there aren’t that many publishers, they tend to have their family, if you like, of poets that they publish, and who knows what lies behind that. It seemed to me it was to be an antidote to Poetry Ireland Review, which at the time was really in the doldrums. They felt we needed a journal that had more international poets, so there was more of a dialogue between Irish poets and poets from other places, other cultures, to liven things up a bit.
PC _Poetry Ireland Review_and _Cyphers_have always had an international dimension, especially Cyphers, but I think Metre‘s frame of reference was even broader, engaging in particular with poets from Australia and the United States.
The quality of the reviews in _Metre_was also very high. Perhaps more could have been done in _Metre_to represent poetry in Irish, but in every issue I think it was clear that the editors were interested not only in what was happening in Ireland but elsewhere. This sense of what was happening elsewhere always informed Cyphers, too, but I think _Metre_played an important role in reinforcing a sense of Irish poetry alongside its contemporary international contexts.
KFI don’t think it was as conservative a publication as some people seem to think. I don’t think it had quite the same type of conservatism _Poetry Ireland Review_had at the time, for example. Looking back, it was a bit more outward looking, a bit more open to formal experiment, a bit more internationalist than people talk about _Metre_now […] but I still think it was pretty conservative. I still think that it was very much that mood of the early 2000s, we were going through one of those convulsions of cosmopolitanism where people in Ireland say ‘right, we’ve thrown off the shackles of the sectarian and nationalist past, and we’re outward looking and internationalist and cosmopolitan now,’ and you’re really not.
Vona Groarke _Metre_was a line of connection, perhaps the most important connection back then, between what I wrote at my kitchen table in Dundalk and the rest of the world. Not just because I had some poems published there, though that meant a great deal, but because _Metre_did what few magazines back then did: it set Irish poetry in the context of what was happening elsewhere, in the UK and the USA. It felt very grown-up and crucial. The cosmopolitanism of the magazine was also very formative, I think: it was a really useful way to smuggle poems out of an Irish poetry world that could sometimes seem like a bell jar (or a Petri dish?) So many of the contributors were either non-Irish or Irish poets of my generation living abroad, and that valve that _Metre_opened was tremendously helpful in reminding those of us living and writing in Ireland that, as Coriolanus says, there is a world elsewhere. With so few Irish poets publishing books with non-Irish presses back then, _Metre_was an important way to remind ourselves that we could be part of something that didn’t (only) define us in terms of nationality.
Conor O’CallaghanThe scene that we all entered into in Ireland when we started publishing was just God-awful. It was absolutely God-awful. The poems and the magazines, and the poems that the magazines were publishing were just absolutely God-awful. This kind of quasi-mystical free-verse shite, I just absolutely hated it. I remember looking at it all and thinking, A: _Where is my work going to belong here?_And B: _Oh, so that’s why I got rejected yet again by all of them._The stuff that was around at the time, the stuff that was being published in _Poetry Ireland Review_and other magazines around at the time was just horrendously poor, and I think if the _Metre_generation meant anything to me, it was just a
handful of people looking outwards into the world and thinking ‘I like that out there, I want to belong to that. I don’t really want to belong to this bullshitty sort of [Irish poet’s name redacted] shite’. I still hate it, it means nothing to me, and if I had to choose between that and the sort of cerebral formalism of Metre, I would always choose the latter.
Metre and Form
JQThe default poem in Ireland in the mid-90s was just kind of free-verse, page and a half, first-person lyric reminiscences, wishful thinking about the future, etc., and so we would have looked to form as a way of just changing that narrative, at least I would.
DWThe qualities we valued, I think, in poetry and criticism, were a sense of formal adventure, musicality, wit, astringency and ‘instress’, some quality of energetic intimacy with the material in hand. Applied to the Irish scene– though Ireland was far from our exclusive focus–these would sweep any dead wood out of the way and allow something new to emerge. Or at any rate give things a bit of a shake.
JQThere was a debate about the title, what we’d call the magazine, and I remember there were doubts about _Metre_being too restrictive as a title, it might be just this idea that links it to the New Formalism in America and that this is all the poetry that we’re interested in, which wasn’t really true. We thought it was also very important to open a line of communication with experimental poetry in Ireland and draw attention to the fact that Maurice Scully was writing sonnets as well as loads of other people and Paul Muldoon writes the weirdest sonnets in the world. Just to stir things up a bit, to say that there are these other modes and that you can write in form but that we were open to more disjunctive modes as well.
CO’COn the outside it must have looked very dry, very cerebral, very formalist, and I know from my own perspective they weren’t my own values, and I know Justin and David have strong sympathies with lots of kinds of wild and crazy, interesting stuff. It was very consciously trying to navigate that nexus between high formalism and experimentalism, that there is this kind of dark side of the poetry moon where these extremes meet, and […] Richard Wilbur and John Ashbery sit side by side. So I suppose on some level, the formalism I encountered in _Metre_was not unlike the formalism you might encounter in say a John Ashbery sestina, that it wasn’t this kind of rigid, metred, platitudinous thing, but that it was using resistant forms as a way of breaking moulds.
_The_Metre Generation
DWThe experience of a cultural moment such as being surrounded by talented young poets can be very different, in that moment, from how it strikes outside observers then and afterwards. The energy is electrifying, and the sense of delight in others’ achievements is very real. I still feel it today. Histories of literary groups seem to gravitate fatally towards disagreements and soured power dynamics, but the writers I am thinking of now are all so different… I couldn’t see the point of trying to do it like them, since they were doing it so well already, so why not just take that sense of discovery and do my own thing instead.
CO’CBecause of my publications in Metre, I noticed I started appearing in a few articles beside the word ‘formalist’. I think that was a natural offshoot of being associated with the ‘_Metre_crowd’… If that means anything, it would be not simply that the poems are formal, that the poems take recognised or traditional poetic shapes, but also that they were always going to and that on some level they should do. I really like formal poetry, I like traditional metres, but I like kind of wild stuff as well. So, I’m kind of nervous of the formalist connotations of being associated with what’s called the _Metre_crowd. Not that I disrespect what other people were doing, I think David and Justin are fantastic poets themselves, more that I knew myself that I liked other things as well and I didn’t want to be confined absolutely by that sort of apparently slightly rigid approach to what constitutes a good poem.
KFThere’s undeniably a generation, and those people associate with one another and they’re friends and those sorts of connections, it kind of informs any kind of publication. But I think where the problem is, is where you start to try to map that onto actual poetic production, that because they were hanging around with one another and they had a lot in common, they’re necessarily writing the same kind of poetry. I think that’s less the case for _Metre_than for some other magazines. I think the whole idea of these groupings is very much more about who you hang around with, very much more about association, than it is about what people are actually doing when they write. It’s more to do with criticism, and the baggage people bring to criticism, than to do with the poetry itself. Of course there was a generation, but I think it might be a mistake to map a certain sort of poetic style onto Metre. I think it was a more various magazine than its posthumous reputation might suggest, or some of its critics might suggest.
JQI suppose people need a handle for that group of poets that started publishing in Ireland in the 90s. Famously people involved in these groups hate being
lumped together, but I quite like being lumped together with these people, they’re still good friends, so if it means I get to have a pint with them every now and again, that’s okay. I don’t have feelings about it one way or another, positive or negative. It’s flattering in a way that it’s associated with the magazine, but beyond that, nothing.
Maria JohnstonI do think there’s a very interesting study that could be done in terms of Trinity, in the same way that there’s such a vibrant community in Queen’s now, based around the Seamus Heaney Centre, and the importance of Belfast and Queen’s in terms of multiple generations of poets. Something similar happened in Trinity, perhaps not of the same enormity… but there is a generation that came out of Trinity, that workshop that Michael Longley ran at Trinity when they were undergraduates, that brought together these personalities and started these conversations.
Criticism and ‘ruffling feathers’
AMI was working freelance mostly. So initially I came on board to help out on that side, proofing and so on. And for the first issue they asked me to review a selection of collections of poetry by Irish poets, because they thought I was a bit removed from poetry circle, I wasn’t married to, living with, or intimately connected with an Irish poet, so they thought that gave me a bit of critical distance. Justin later said, they realised they had given me a hospital pass on that one. I wouldn’t have set out to ruffle feathers. I didn’t feel it was incumbent on us to be critical of, for example, Irish poetry just for the sake of it, but just to open up more debate around poetry here.
JQThe example of _Thumbscrew_was very important for us, in Oxford, run by Tim [Kendall] and John Redmond. David and I had both written for _Thumbscrew_and we really liked it because we felt they were shaking things up. Oxford is often thought to be the cultural hub of the UK, but the way Tim was doing it was being in the total sticks. He was outside the London poetry scene, and we saw a huge advantage to being outside those circles of schmooze that allowed you to tread on a lot of toes. That was an important exemplar.
DW _Metre_certainly did ruffle feathers, and was happy to pick up tips from _Thumbscrew_on doing just that. This being pre-social media days, the response cycle was a lot slower than now, but we got our share of aggrieved letters. But while this may be an inevitable by-product of critical plain-speaking, I wouldn’t see it as an aim in itself. For all my various loose-cannon moments in those days, I became aware that my thing, as a critic, was very much more telling people to go read Gwen Harwood, George Oppen or Kamau Brathwaite, than placing
myself on stand-by to squash the latest folly of the age. I think this arc towards self-awareness was something that came into focus for me over the decade or so of Metre‘s life.
VGIts criticism was top notch: nothing parochial or nepotistic about it. You wouldn’t be sure, necessarily, of a positive review, but you’d know that even if it was negative, it was going to be smart and stylishly written. And that seemed more important: there’s a tad too much of the merely competent about reviewing in Ireland now. _Metre_reviews were scrupulous, and held us to a high standard, and that was good for us.
MJThere were no sacred cows. There was no sense of anyone being above criticism. Poetry is an art form, and as with any other art form, criticism is not personal… it’s about the poetry, it’s about fitting it into larger critical narratives. There’s an energy, that sustaining energy, that means you’re having conversations about the past, looking to a future, and working in the present, having these debates and conversations. That kind of freedom is just not there now, and there isn’t a magazine like Metre.
CO’CI liked the fact they gave you international books and they actively encouraged you to be honest, as long as you were witty and intelligent about it. I wouldn’t say they encouraged you to be negative. The kind of stuff getting published in other Irish magazines was just God-awful and thick as…
JQI suppose the problem–that we would have seen–is that we were outside the system at that stage. We knew nobody personally within the poetry world. There’s a real danger, I think, to be physically in a place. But I think physically being in a place, and once you start publishing, publishing your own poetry, writing criticism, or publishing a magazine, you have to be nice to people. You’re not going to go punch people in the face, like Richard Ford who spat in the face of one of his critics [Colson Whitehead]. Simply by having to be nice to people, you start to get compromised in a way. So we were trying to use that geographical distance that we had to say things we wouldn’t have been actually able to say otherwise.
Diverse Voices
PCI always had the impression that everyone on the editorial team was keen for the magazine to be as representative as possible, partly reflected by its early subtitle, ‘A Magazine of International Poetry’, which I think was dropped around issue 9, possibly because it was by then clearly established as a magazine with a strong international profile and focus. I don’t recall ever having any
disagreements with other members of the editorial team about the magazine’s content or direction. Although our understanding of the term ‘representative’ has undergone important revisions since then, I think the first issue of _Metre_was astonishingly diverse for all that it covered in its 60-odd pages.
AMThere were several women on the board, and I don’t recall anyone taking issue with that, but it did strike me when reading back through the issues online, when I look at them all together, that there was a preponderance of men, but that was the way things were at the time, and to be fair to Justin and David, they just went with good poetry. So, it wasn’t something that struck me at the time really, that there was a preponderance of men, I mean there were women poets, and women involved in it. I suppose nowadays people are afraid of opening their mouths for fear of offending someone, and I think at that time there was a little less of that fear.
KFWe could have done a lot more about finding out what the poets in Ghana are up to these days. I really think one of the big failings was how–not anglophone- centric, because there were works in translation, but… it was white, let’s put it frankly. I think there could have been a lot more outreach to the Global South in general, much more engagement with what was going on outside of Europe and North America. No real excuses there. I don’t mean that as a criticism, it was doing what it was doing, so I’m not saying David and Justin should have done more. We all should have done more.
JQWhen you got in touch, I was thinking ‘okay’. I didn’t start counting [Metre‘s gender balance] because I was afraid what I would find out. The conversation about ethnicity wasn’t even there, we weren’t aware of it. When I think about it now, I wouldn’t have been able to read that work. I would have been, maybe, if it had come from America… In terms of gender, I would have felt that the gender issue almost seemed to have been solved at that stage, which of course it wasn’t. I saw that, I remember at that stage that Eavan Boland was very high ranking in the Arts Council and there was a sense that the kind of issues that she had tabled since the 1970s had created the environment around us, and I felt that we didn’t really have to address those issues or think consciously about them. I would have thought that there were so many poets around us whose work we admired and wanted to publish that the gender thing just didn’t arise. We didn’t think of even counting, I thought we had that one covered. There’s not a lot more I can say about that. It’s very hard to say about one’s previous attitudes in these things. I know as a book reader, I wouldn’t have been able to work out what was going on in a poem by, say, Louise Bennett. I had no idea my own social limitations were so strong that the kind of transitions that go on in a poem like
that, the kind of social and historical contexts it works within and works so well with, I just had no idea of any of that, and I wasn’t able to read work like that. It took many, many years for that kind of change, that kind of broadening of the horizon to occur.
DWIt’s probably best to slice through the Gordian knot on this issue and own up unequivocally to my numerous failings and blind-spots on these issues as a young man. I hadn’t thought them through clearly, and didn’t know better. A pet theory of mine is that, for all its poor image, the immediate post-war period was considerably more inclusive of women poets than the 1970s and 80s. Compare the MacDonagh and Robinson _Oxford Book of Irish Verse_to Kinsella’s, which swept away not just the women poets of the Revival, but all but a single woman (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill). There is the temptation here to convert my education in these matters (eventually) into a personal consciousness-raising narrative, but I don’t think anyone needs to hear that. Some things got through to me, though, which have proved crucial ever since. Lorine Niedecker’s strain of Objectivism–reviewed in our first issue–has proved very important for me, as an alternative to the Lowellite soap opera. We published Denise Riley in our first issue as well, and she too has been a lodestar. The connection with Jane Yeh–a pamphlet of whose we published–was also important. These may not be the authors people associate with any ‘_Metre_aesthetic’, but they’re writers from whom I picked up a more expansive and testing poetics than I was trading on when I set out. But the women poets of my generation too were stronger, clearer voices than mine, with much more sense of what they were doing, and to them too I can only acknowledge an enormous debt.
Ending
JQIt just got to the stage where I couldn’t continue with the editing. I just had too much on my plate at the time, I had a young family, academic stuff, but also there was a knowledge, at the back of my mind at least, that these things have a limited life in that format, either they have to get bigger or they can’t continue. I think that it comes to a crossroads like that. It was a lot of work, with neither of us in Dublin, liaising with the printer. I was dealing with most of the production, in terms of the typesetting and the printers, and doing that from Prague was a terrible nightmare, especially without high-speed internet.
AMI think it was a pity it concluded. Justin got tired of doing the desktop publishing, which is a lot of work, and he stepped down. At that point I had started working full time in a formal job and I was finding I had less time to work on the magazine and do the manual stuff I was doing, so I stepped down shortly
after he did, and that left David. Now there were other people involved at the time, but it just became difficult to replace, particularly to replace Justin doing the desktop publishing. So it wasn’t that there was an inevitability or a decline, it was more just personal reasons, people fell away from it and weren’t replaced. A lot of these things have a limited life. They are so much driven by the people involved, that’s what it depends on, and if you lose people and you can’t replace them, then it loses its energy.
DWIt felt like a sudden stop, at the time, but in retrospect it looks more like a natural termination. Justin decided he wasn’t able to continue, and while I may have harboured delusions of flying the flag on my own, in practice I didn’t have anything like Justin’s level of design skills and ability to turn a Word file into a print-ready pdf. I think all small magazines have a natural life-cycle though, and will often end for the good reason that they’ve achieved everything they set out to do. There is a personal dimension to this narrative, for me, too. In 1996 I thought of myself as part of a metropolitan culture (Dublin), where _Metre_might act as some kind of player in a crowded field. But by the time we stopped I was living in Hull, and aware of myself as a kind of born-again provincial, writing poems about drains and industrial canals and offering Peter Didsbury tips in interviews for removing cat-hair from cushions. That’s quite a shift. But almost certainly for the better.
MJWhen something is at the end, it can be hard to see it is. It kind of petered out, as far as I was concerned. Just nothing happened. And then nothing continued to happen. And then _Metre_was over. I have no doubt things were going on that I didn’t know about, they all had long-established friendships, relationships… and they were in their thirties, life was happening, jobs, people were having children, I think there was just this sense of dispersal. It was very much a magazine born out of youthful confidence and fearlessness, and at a certain point that dries up. It’s a pity. It’s a lot of hard work, and it can be very difficult to sustain that kind of thing financially as well.
Legacy
VG _Metre_was a moment in Irish poetry. It felt like the best kind of company– urbane, well-read, discerning and stylish. It also felt like community, for a whole gang of my generation, in a scattering of countries. It’s easy to forget that in a pre-internet age, that sense of community was much harder to come by. I’m very glad that it lasted as long as it did and that it was as good as it was: I honestly don’t think my generation of Irish poets would have written the books we did without that sense of it mattering somehow, and to more than just ourselves.
CO’CWhatever about the aesthetics of the formalist thing, that’s all well and good, but they did actually publish some excellent poems, and I think they should be proud of that.
KFI think if somebody’s writing a literary history of the time, it’s something they would want to look at. It might be of interest. I think some of the essays are still of general interest, I think some of the poems are still worth reading. It did its thing, and I think at the time it was filling a space. Worthwhile. I wouldn’t want to make any huge claims for it, but I’m very glad it existed, I’m very glad that Justin and David did it.
PCI think it had an impact on those involved in setting it up and their subsequent careers and reputations. Whenever critical studies of their work are written, the fact that David, Justin and Caitríona, in particular, were closely involved in Metre, will almost certainly be cited as an important factor in their development. I think, too, that younger poets who published in _Metre_felt that this was an important moment of recognition.
MJIn the now, in the present, what we are left with is the _Metre_archive online, which is a wonderful digital poetry resource. I don’t really feel it’s being mined enough. It’s astonishing to just even look at the contents pages. The roll call of names… and it’s just a little magazine coming out of Dublin. Their legacy is still a work in progress. It should be the return of proper criticism where there’s a robust approach to poetry as an art form. The legacy of the _Metre_generation should be that kind of attention to poetry as an art form and to poetry criticism also as, perhaps not an art form, but certainly a craft which requires love–to use that old-fashioned word–love of words, of language, of poetry, and its shaping energies, and a fearlessness, that it’s not about ticking boxes to do with identity politics. First and foremost, I would love to see a return of that kind of value of criticism.
AMWhat’s interesting, when I looked at the list of poets, many of them are still writing, still producing, still developing their poetry in interesting ways… they’re all people still very much engaged in the literary world… I think that’s a testament to Metre. It brought together people who were very committed to poetry, and who remain committed to poetry, even now without that formal structure of Metre. They’ve all gone off on their own paths, but I guess having had that solidarity and connection at an earlier stage in their careers may have helped to foster their work and promote it. And that’s the best you can say about a magazine or journal like that–that it helped bring forward new talent and promote it.
DWOne answer to this was my wait, when _Metre_finished, for someone or something to come along and pick up where we left off, perhaps symbolically slaying us in the process too. But it didn’t quite happen like that. I gradually realised that the thing that would come along next would take a very different form from Metre‘s. I look at Anne Mulhall’s chapter at the end of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry(Cambridge University Press) and see a contemporary landscape unrecognisably altered from the one I inhabited, and to which _Metre_might have struggled to adapt. But all magazines have their moments, and it can be to their credit to bow out when the moment passes rather than sinking into self-curated heritage status. _Metre_stood for a radical critical energy, and an aesthetic that went well beyond traditional conservative formalism. So for all I’ve changed in the intervening years, I can still feel that continuity, on my pulse. The extent to which that energy entered the bloodstream of wider Irish poetry is probably not for me to say. All through the lifespan of the magazine, my greatest debt was to Justin Quinn’s constant good sense and good humour, the ground bass over which my scattergun randomness performed its fitful variations.
JQI’ve got nothing for you. I just don’t know. I think that I and David and all of us on the editorial board, we just did it and that’s our work done, it’s up to other people to decide that. I suppose we just wanted to get a bit of a platform for people’s work we liked. We wanted to make them feel it was good to be together. To say this stuff is going on, the world is out there, and to just put a sign up and say this stuff is happening.